Born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam in 1970, now living in the US as a claimed and renamed TRA

No More Angels For You

What the Holts and Operation Babylift have taught Westerners is that in order to justify the act of taking small brown bodies from their countries of origin and raising them in their own image all you have to do is reduce the child’s circumstances to one of two alternatives: “leave to rot” in an inhumane orphanage or raise up in a “loving family” where with time and material excess everyone will forget and be the better for it. These two historical events speak to a disturbing pattern exhibited by Westerners toward developing countries. With a mixture of good ole paternalism and a pinch of racial superiority, and under cover of civil wars, social upheavals and economic instability, they extracted us without any sense of irony that Western countries had a big hand in triggering these crises.

Praising us as Asian angels borne from cargo holds and cardboard boxes, we were never expected to look back and think about our lives before adoption, much less about our countries of birth. The American flags we were given upon assuming citizenship were supposed to blind us with star-spangled magnificence. It is only within the past decade that many of us have become wise to the racial self-hatred that had been instilled in us and have questioned the multiple loyalty tests we have been forced to take in order to prove our legitimacy in the eyes of our fellow Americans.

The pitiful footage of children in orphanages and then triumphant arrival in foreign airports has remained the same despite the changing of the years because the main adoption themes are replayed over and over with the same tune playing in the background. It is not a mistake that adoption agencies, adoption advocates and adoptive parents still refer to the legacy of the Holts and Operation Babylift in the most glowing of terms because it is yet another instrument for Americans to prove their generosity of spirit and can-do attitude to themselves. Like the Bertha Holts and Rosemary Taylors of yore, American wanna-be parents assume the role of well-meaning world citizens who also want to save thrown-away orphans from hell-hole countries.

Currently, Vietnam is experiencing similar social and economic growing pains as South Korea did during the 1970s and 80s. Korean children were the hot commodity in international adoption up until many adult Korean adoptees put the South Korean government’s feet to the fire and made it acknowledge the mass production aspect of its adoption policies. With many more legal and monetary barriers in place in South Korea, Westerners turned once again to Vietnam and enjoyed unfettered access to Vietnamese children, especially infants. In early 2008, the U.S. State Department investigated a growing number of inconsistencies in the documentation of children’s orphan status and reports of child trafficking. This led to a halt in adoptions between the U.S. and Vietnam in September of this year. But, much like the attitude exhibited by Americans in 1975 when Operation Babylift commenced and they were criticized for seemingly taking advantage of a bad situation, many prospective American adoptive parents today are incredulous about the charges of official corruption and baby selling. These children only need a home and a loving family, they plead. Who would ever deny them that?